S7┬ÀE4 ÔÇö The Spoils of War

The hour retold

Winterfell gets its warmest hour of the entire final stretch before the war swallows it whole. Arya Stark comes home at last, to a family she assumed scattered or dead, and the reunion with Bran plays quiet and strange ÔÇö he is not quite the brother she remembers ÔÇö while her sparring match with Brienne of Tarth turns into the seasonÔÇÖs single lightest scene, two of the showÔÇÖs most formidable women testing each other to a smiling draw. In the same hall, Bran hands Arya the Valyrian steel dagger that was once sent to kill him, and delivers, almost as an aside, the line that has quietly organized six seasons of scheming: chaos is a ladder ÔÇö LittlefingerÔÇÖs own words, recited back at him by a boy who now sees everything.

Then the hour turns south and becomes something else entirely. Daenerys, tired of losing a clever war on paper, decides to fight an ugly one in person: she and the Dothraki fall on the Lannister supply train returning from Highgarden, and the resulting Loot Train Attack is the showÔÇÖs first full demonstration of what a dragon actually does to an army with no answer for one ÔÇö screaming horses, men on fire mid-stride, siege wagons flattened like kindling. It is spectacle, but the show refuses to let it stay only spectacle; the camera keeps finding individual soldiers, burning or trampled, men who signed up for a war and got an extinction event instead.

At the center of the carnage is Jaime Lannister, watching his army annihilated and doing the one reckless, almost suicidal thing his whole life has trained him against: charging a dragon alone with a spear, aiming for the woman on its back rather than the beast itself. BronnÔÇÖs scorpion bolt saves him from DrogonÔÇÖs fire at the very last second, and the two of them go under the lakeÔÇÖs surface together, saved from immolation only to nearly drown instead ÔÇö a soldierÔÇÖs bargain, traded across an episode that spends its first half establishing a family reunited and its second half demonstrating, in the bluntest possible terms, exactly how outmatched the family Arya just came home to still is.

What happens

• Arya comes home to Winterfell; the reunion is warm, the sparring with Brienne is warmer.
• Bran gives Littlefinger's own dagger a history lesson: "Chaos is a ladder."
• Dany stops playing clever wars: Drogon and the Dothraki fall on the Lannister loot train.
• The Reach's gold is safe behind the walls ÔÇö but the field becomes ash, and Jaime charges a dragon.

The people of the episode